134 music, philosophy, and modernity
of the differing forms of articulation in modernity. Here the question
of nihilism again comes into play, because of the way in which phi-
losophy is supposed to transcend immediacy. Hegel repeatedly insists
that music’s inherent transience makes it an inferior stage of the appear-
ance ofGeist. The pattern of mediation is, as we have seen, one in which
transient material is overcome by its incorporation intoGeist’s inferen-
tial structures. The paradigm of this is the move from note to word,
and the accompanying idealisation of the representation designated by
the word, as opposed to the immediate, transient inner feeling related
to the note. Brandom’s comment on the process of conceptualisation,
that ‘the immediacies that became first available are construed assigns’,
exactly parallels Hegel’s account of the move from music to language.
The question is whether the mediation may not involve some kind of
exclusion or repression of certain kinds of meaning.
The most complete version of the move from immediacy to media-
tion is required by Hegel to establish ‘absolute knowledge’, which Bran-
dom saw in terms of ‘explanation of what it is to say something that is
powerful enough to explain what it itself is saying’.^9 Absolute knowledge
transcends all the particular relations between things which philosophy
reveals to be inherent in contentful thought, in order to articulate the
overall structure of how thought and being relate. The question is how
to interpret philosophy’s claim to attain a position which transcends
all forms of immediacy. Hegel is aiming at more than just a critique
of empiricism, as the disqualification of the supposedly lower forms of
Geistin the name of the final elimination of sensuousness makes clear.
In one sense, of course, he just means that music cannot do what verbal
language can, lacking the meta-linguistic capacity that allows alternative
descriptions of specific things. However, the assessment of the relative
importance of these means of articulation is undertaken in the name
of philosophy’s ability to overcome the immediacy of the forms which
precede it.
What, though, does this overcoming concretely mean in relation to
the socio-historical world, and philosophy’s role in it? If one really were
able to reach absolute knowledge, what would be achieved by having
done so? In one sense philosophy could therefore come to an end:
having resolved the question of how mind and world relate, it could be
9 Brandom refers to Hegel’s ‘objective idealism’, but Hegel advocates ‘absolute ideal-
ism’. The former involves the idea that philosophy seeks to analyse the contingent,
socially located historical interactions of mind and world, and the latter is summed up
by Habermas as the claim to encompass the ‘context of all contexts’.